Christmas

As promised, I'm doing our Christmas post. Only a week after Christmas, not too bad eh?
We had a lot of fun this Christmas. We spent time with both sides of the family - it's fairly easy to do when the two sides live only an hour apart. We spent most of the time with the Innes side, as my Sister Amy and her family were up, and we wanted our girls to have a chance to play with their cousins. So there ended up being 8 grandkids at my parents, with the oldest being 12. Only one grandson too! So our girls had a lot of fun with their cousins.

We spent part of Christmas eve with Chelsey's family. Ate their traditional meal of appetizers (the Parks really really like doing appetizer meals! Its a lot of fun as you get to eat a bunch of different things). When we first got there, Chelsey helped Jada and Kayla put out some "Reindeer Food" - Oatmeal and sugar and sparkles - in the snow. They were excited to leave some food for Rudolf and his friends.

We also opened up a present each. The girls got to open their present from Grandma. They got some small cloth diaper bags and homemade diapers and bibs for their baby dolls. They loved it.

After a short time with Chelsey's Family, we went off to Cardston. As I said, Amy was up, so we decided to go into to Cardston and sleep at my parents house so the girls could sleep with their Cousins. We left some cookies out for Santa, and finally got them in bed about 9ish. It was late for our girls and Amy's girls, but it was Christmas!

Claire, Jada and Jane

 

The next morning, my dad said that they all got up at 530am! Way to early! But they opened up their stockings, and played downstairs. We ate breakfast first, as we knew that once we started opening presents, our girls wouldn't want to do anything else.

 Jada helping pass out presents

 

Christmas morning fun

 

its a little bird

 

Looking at the new toys

 Alayna slept most of that time, so we had Jada and Kayla help open hers later. Everyone had a good time with Christmas. Jada because she went to bed late and got up way too early was out of sorts a bit. Every so oft she would start crying "I want to go home". After a few minutes, her cousins would say, "Jada come play' and happily she went to play again. She got some new colouring things, and had a great time talking and colouring with her cousins. I a new game - Munchkin (I've played before, and have some of the other sets, but never got the original till now) - and I surprised Chelsey with some new baking pans. Kayla's favorite present was a play shopping cart, that could fit her baby dolls in. In fact, once she had that, she didn't care about opening other presents for a little bit.
Chelsey and I had fun playing board games with Amy and Mike and catching up with everyone.

All in all, we had a good time. Can't wait till next year's Christmas when Alayna is more into it!

Blessing, Birthdays and Prechristmas fun!

 

 

There has been a lot and lot of things in the month leading up to Christmas (christmas blog to follow soon) that has kept us busy busy busy!
First of all, We had Alayna`s baby blessing. Doesn`t she have a cute smile? All our girls have lots of fun smiles!

 

 

 

She was a good baby during the blessing, and Chelsey thinks that Mike did a really nice job. She was blessed in the same dress that all of her sisters were blessed in. After church, We had a bunch of family and friends over for a 'appitizer' dinner - we just had everyone bring their favorite appizier or shairing plate, and just enjoyed each others company as we ate good food.

 

 

Great Grandma and little Alayna both asleep

 

It was lots of fun! However, there was no time to take a rest as we had birthdays right after that!  Mike turned 30 this year. I don't really feel any older, but 30 I am. Chelsey's birthday was the day after mine. No, she isn't 30 this year. As we decided to do a joint party on Chelsey's birthday, we made a little birthday treat that the girls could share in on each of our birthdays. The girls also got to blow out a candle and sing happy birthday to us

 

 

 

We called our birthday party "Mike turns 30 and Chelsey has a birthday" Birthday bash. We invited as many people as we knew, and while not everyone came, we had a good turnout. We played games, talked, ate cake, and just had a good time over all.

 

Soon after this, Cheley's Sister Kiplin had her birthday. She wanted to make gingerbread houses, so Chelsey kept very busy making home made (very delious!) gingerbread. Everyone had a good time making gingerbread houses, and eating some of the candy while decorating. The girls had a good time making gingerbread men. I wasn't able to help out with gingerbread stuff as I had to work late (again). Late night shopping was in full swing at the mall - Right up to Christmas eve. It got very tedious, and it was a hard time on the girls, but we eventually got through it.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chelsey made a beautiful gingerbread tree, and we were going to make a Chinese style pagoda, however that never happened. Too much going on. Perhaps next year we will do that. 

All that Gingerbread made Chelsey really like the smell, so she found a recipe for Gingerbread playdough. The kids love rolling it out and making 'gingerbread cookies'. It was a good pre-christmas play idea for them.

 

 

So this is what has kept us busy for the last little while. We will post Christmas, and a 2012 in review shortly.... Hopefully not too many days into the new year. Hahaha

Potty Training Adventures

So Guess who is (mostly) potty trained now?

MAKAYLA!

 

Thats right, Makayla is now (more or less) potty trained. We've been doing it for about a month, and she picked up really quickly. I guess it helps having a big sister who shows her what to do! She has her share of accidents still, so we are washing a fair share of pants, but thats par for course. She often runs to the potty saying pee-pee all by her self. She still needs help pulling her pants down - in fact once, she sat on the potty by her self, with her pants still up, happily peeing in the potty - Would you call this a sucess or an accident or a sucident? At least she got to the potty, right? We are still working on teaching her how to get her pants up and down, but we figured bladder control first - we can always help her with the pants.

 

Every time she goes potty, we say Yay Kayla, and she just smiles. With Jada, we had to bribe her with potty treats, but Kayla loves just getting a Yay. Its so fun seeing her smile.

 

Now, only if we could get them both night trained, and alayna trained.....